Privacy and Inequality

Sometimes I think about moving back to Canada, but then something like this comes along and I change my mind: Statistics Canada looking at people’s banking records? Now that’s going too far.

The ability for governments to collect data through the information system is so easy that what is being collected should concern citizens. Global News reported this week that the Canadian government will be asking financial institutions to collect and provide data from some 500,000 Canadians without their knowledge. According to Global: “the national statistical agency plans to collect ‘individual-level financial transactions data’ and sensitive information, like social insurance numbers (SIN), from Canadian financial institutions to develop a ‘new institutional personal information bank.’”

What is really irksome is that this information was collected secretly and with no public consultation whatsoever. Privacy, to my mind, is a non-negotiable item.

I also ran across this item, which I think dovetails with the previous one: A question of class: how do social inequality metrics work in cultural organisations?

At the London Film Festival last week, the British Film Institute (BFI) announced it was going to start measuring ‘class and socio-economic background in their funding and staffing’. This move reflects the growing attention given to inequalities in the arts: academic evidence increasingly shows that cultural professions are unequal across ethnicity, gender, age, disability and class.

How we measure class and social mobility to reveal inequality is a thorny issue, however. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s recent appeal for the BBC to publish information on the social origins of its workforce received some backlash. One columnist objected to the proposal, suggesting that people’s ‘backgrounds would be audited’ and that they would feel ‘judged’.

Oh, you bet! Jordan Peterson proposed a while ago that there should be a "red line" to evaluate when the extreme left has gone too far. There is certainly one for the right: as soon as you espouse racist or sexist ideas, you are adjudged to be beyond the pale. But what on the left is going too far? He proposed that demanding equity or some form of equality of outcome is the benchmark for an extreme left that has gone too far. I think he is correct on this.

There is a superficially plausible argument that goes like this:

• Poverty and want are real problems in society
• Some people have enormous wealth while others struggle
• This is fundamentally unjust
• Therefore we have to structure society so that people have more equal outcomes

There is just enough truth in this to give fodder to social engineers. But when you delve below the surface a number of other problems arise. First of all, the problems of wealth and poverty are global, not merely local. Some countries are wealthy while others are poor. Why is this? The reasons are manifold. Some countries have natural resources that they exploit successfully. Others with no natural resources have enormous human capital that produces wealth. Other countries have both natural resources and human capital but remain impoverished through corruption and failure to administer justice.

The problem with the socialist solution (and when the argument is given in the form above, it is always so the solution will be socialism) is that it begins by robbing the citizenry of both moral agency and freedom. You have no responsibility for your poverty (or wealth), it is instead a product of shadowy forces of evil and oppression. In order to identify who is virtuous and who is evil we have to carefully observe and monitor everyone. Then we will pass laws fixing the inequality. Oh, and whenever this is done the society collapses into a hellhole of crime, disease and hunger. See Venezuela, Cambodia, China under Mao, Russia under Stalin and so on.

The way to resist the early stages of this disease is to insist on the maximum personal privacy and freedom. The road to hell starts with the supposed innocent collection of personal information. It's downhill from there.

One composer who suffered under the totalitarian oppression of socialism (in an extreme form) was Dmitri Shostakovich. In Taruskin's discussion of his Symphony No. 5, described by the powers that be in the Soviet Union at the time as a "work of philosophical depth and emotional force," he notes that it is a "richly coded utterance, but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively phrased." He points out that in Russia in 1937, under the terror of Stalin, "this last was a saving, not to say a lifesaving grace." The work could be read in various ways and this double meaning is why the music could be both reassuring to the commissars and emotionally moving to the ordinary people who cried at the premiere.

In a socialist society ordinary people preserve a measure of privacy and freedom by lying to the authorities, even, or especially, artists.